"Unfortunately for my characters, I do tend to need them to be devastated at some point or another."

Bestselling author Clémence Michallon on juggling dual time lines, building "sky-high" emotional stakes, and her dark sophomore thriller, OUR LAST RESORT

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Clemence’s twisty mystery, available now.

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Me: Clemence, hello!

Clémence: Andrea, hello!

I'm so happy to be speaking with you!

How's it going? Huge congrats on your sophomore novel!

Thank you so much! It's going well—I actually was just reunited with my guitar, so I was playing a few songs right before this, haha. I think that's a pretty good picture for what I'm doing now that my book tour is over: playing guitar on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

That sounds like a rather lovely way to deal with the comedown haha

(Dare I say: rather French!)

Hahaha, yes! And I was playing French songs, too. And singing. It's very therapeutic

I've been getting into sewing for a related reason...feels like using my hands and focusing on something other than a screen is the only effective way to destress these days

Absolutely. I really admire people who know how to sew. I'm pretty hopeless at it, I have to say. What have you sewn so far? And how are you doing?

I'm still not very good! I bought a sewing machine at a stoop sale, then took one lesson at the Bobinage in Industry City. So far I've made some pillow cases out of curtains and I'm working on some dog toys and a seat cushion!

And I'm doing pretty well, thank you! But I do want to get into all things Our Last Resort—can you share what it's about?

Of course! But first I do want to say that being able to sew pillow cases sounds pretty badass, in my opinion. Ok, so! Our Last Resort!

OLR—as I've come to refer to it in my head—tells the story of Frida and Gabriel, two people who travel to a beautiful but very remote hotel in the desert in Utah to try to mend their sibling relationship. Everything is going well—not perfectly well, but fine—until, a few days into their stay, a female guest turns up dead, evidently murdered. The murder investigation is going to quickly focus on Gabriel, because it's not the first time a woman has died in his orbit.

Frida and Gabriel share a particular kind of bond, because they grew up together in a cult in upstate New York. So the novel is told in dual timelines: one spans days and follows the murder investigation at the hotel and its consequences on our characters; the other spans years and follows Frida and Gabriel's past in the cult and the fallout that ensued.

I was lucky to read this one early and I enjoyed it so much! Where'd the idea come from?

Thank you so much! That really means a lot coming from you.

The setting was actually what came first for this one, which is something that happens rarely to me. (I've only published two thrillers, but I think I'm starting to kind of know myself as a writer, and setting isn't usually what I think about first!)

What happened was this: my previous crime novel, The Quiet Tenant, is set in the Hudson Valley in the winter. So in that book, it's always cold; the ground is frozen; the sun sets early. And it's a captivity story, too, so the settings are simple: there's a garden shed, a house, a restaurant, and that's basically it. So when the time came to think about the next book, I thought: "I want to go somewhere warm and beautiful." And my mind traveled back to a beautiful but very isolated hotel that I went to years and years ago, in the desert in Utah... It was a gorgeous place, but very isolated, and surrounded by the desert, which is pretty inhospitable to human life as far as climates go. And I thought it would be interesting to set a murder story in a hotel much like that one.

I love it! The desert setting is so striking—they're in the middle of nowhere, yet in the lap of luxury. How'd you go about shaping a narrative around that location?